Elevated to television after his broadcasts from the London Blitz, Edward R. Murrow looked as reliable as he sounded. His pinstriped suits, heavy brows and geometric hairline were the perfect analogue to his rock-steady voice. Murrow rarely played to the camera; in photographs, he always seems to be turning testily from the business at hand, and he often read his See It Now copy looking down at an offscreen script, as if the words he spoke were more important than his performance. But when he fixed the lens with that ice-water stare, the effect was galvanizing, and still is a half-century later.

As played by David Strathairn in Good Night, And Good Luck. , Murrow isn't so much galvanizing as iron-clad, thin as a rail and about as flexible. (The title's awkward punctuation is an attempt to reproduce the cadence of Murrow's famous sign-off.) Though most of Good Night focuses on Murrow's 1954 dogfight with red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the movie opens with Murrow's 1958 speech to the Radio and Television News Directors Association, in which he excoriated the assembled executives for being "wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent," and reminded them that unless it is guided by conscience, television "is merely wires and lights in a box." The speech did nothing to change the industry's perception that Murrow was a virtuous liability, but it is still taught in journalism schools as an example, and as a warning.

George Clooney, who directed, co-wrote (with Grant Heslov) and plays Murrow's faithful producer, Fred W. Friendly, matches Strathairn's severity with a high-contrast black and white palette and a cloistered mise-en-scene confined almost entirely to the CBS offices of See It Now. Considering that See It Now was notable for its on-the-scene reportage, Good Night's lack of exteriors is mildly ironic; Murrow and his staff might as well be in a submarine, or the nuclear bunkers of the Clooney-orchestrated Fail-Safe remake. The movie's focus gives it an airless intensity, as if Clooney were determined not to allow any distractions from the issue at hand.

The issue is a weighty and a timely one: the responsibility of journalism — and, more pointedly, journalists — to make their voices heard in a climate of fear. Fear, of course, was the fuel to McCarthy's flame. Looking only at the facts, it's hard to understand why the Wisconsin demagogue wasn't laughed off the political stage. He couldn't give two speeches without varying the purported number of "known Communists" in high levels of government, but his very imprecision helped sow panic: If there were 57 Communists in the State Department yesterday, and 205 today, who knew how many there might be tomorrow? In an era when being labeled a Communist, a fellow traveler, or even a "premature anti-Fascist" was enough to kill your career, facts were merely an impediment.

See It Now turned the tables on McCarthy by presenting the senator "in his own words," a strategy Good Night echoes. McCarthy appears only in archival excerpts, a televised specter squaring off against a flesh-and-blood Murrow. Murrow comes out ahead, as he did in the original broadcasts, but there's a downside to his corporeality. Clooney and Heslov's Murrow is more than a symbol, but less than a man, a pillar of virtue with the warmth of a bedpost. Although the real-life Murrow championed the interview program Person to Person as a means to "revive the art of conversation," Good Night stages Murrow's living-room chat with Liberace as if the no-nonsense newsman has been sullied by the experience — an implication that has more to do with Clooney's take on celebrity journalism than Murrow's.

The movie interjects a few personal touches, like the way Friendly, squatting just out of shot, intimately cues Murrow with a pen tap to the leg. But the cutaways to two staffers (Robert Downey, Jr. and Patricia Clarkson) who hide their marriage to avoid running afoul of CBS' anti-fraternization policy are clumsily executed, and worse, dilute the movie's sense of purpose: If everyone, not just alleged leftists, has something to hide, then McCarthy isn't the unique villain he seems, just a symptom of a disease that will ever be with us.

In retrospect, the most important confrontation in Good Night is not the Murrow-McCarthy showdown, but the face-off between Murrow and CBS head William S. Paley (Frank Langella). Although Paley respects Murrow's work, the broadcasts sell poorly and alienate advertisers (an Alcoa logo burns forlornly on an overhead monitor during Murrow's first attack; the company pulled their support before the broadcast). When an uncompromising Murrow tells Paley, in essence, that the news is supposed to lose money, Paley responds, "People want to enjoy themselves. They don't want a civics lesson." The trouble with Good Night, And Good Luck. is its assumption that the two are incompatible.